


Self-Portraits from Elonia

by ckret2



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Culture, Art, Bittersweet, Cybertronian Colonies, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Melancholy, Post-Canon, Post-The Transformers: Unicron Issue 6 (IDW), Post-War, Self-Discovery, Zine, there's no character tag for stardrive yet??? my girl deserves better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22139146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Stardrive, who has always been identified and self-identified as the lone Cybertronian on Elonia, is familiar only with the aspect of Cybertronian culture that Elonians know about: warfare.She's shocked when she learns that, with the war over, the Camiens have creating a gallery on Mercury to display the collected artwork of the Cybertronian diaspora.She's even more shocked when she learns that they want her—as the lone Cybertronian from Elonia—to contributeherart.The only problem is she doesn'tmakeart. But she'll do her best. And, in the process, maybe learn what "Cybertronian art"is.(Originally published in the Transformers "Snapshots" zine. Chapter 1 is the 1,500 word version of this fic published in the Transformers Snapshots fanzine; chapter 2 is the full 5,300 word version.)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57





	1. (1500 word zine version)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally published in the "Snapshots" zine ([tumblr](https://tfsnapshots.tumblr.com/)) ([twitter](https://twitter.com/SnapshotsTFzine)), which went out September 2019! I actually could've posted this back then but mirroring fics over onto AO3 is so _boring_. I've got to, like. Sit. And think up tags. And copy/paste words.
> 
> The first time I wrote the fic I just wrote whatever the hell I wanted and it ended up 5,300 words, but the page limit in the zine meant it had to be 1,500 words so I produced a pared-down version for the zine. Now available for the first time, _250% more Stardrive!!_
> 
>  **If you want to read the full-length version, feel free to skip straight to chapter 2!** If you want to see the version from the zine first, stick around.

The Camien Fine Art Museum and Performance Hall of Mercury lived up to its name—the main building certainly looked like it could be a horseshoe-shaped museum, it embraced a dome-covered performance hall, and it shone like mercury. The museum was silvery, smooth, and rounded; the columns decorating the facade and the framework of the dome were clear crystal pipes with liquid quicksilver helixes flowing through them. Stardrive's optics were glued to the view outside the _Peaceful Revolution_ 's window. She'd never seen such a breathtakingly beautiful structure.

She mentally compared the glorious museum to the old papers tucked under her armor, and winced. They wouldn't fit in here.

But she'd been asked to bring them anyway, so here she was.

###

According to a map she found near the main staircase, there were exhibit halls for War Art, Antebellum Cybertron, Velocitron, Arduria, and Eukaris, plus a theater on the second floor. The remaining colonies all shared a single massive hall—those ones, she supposed, had contributed too little to stand on their own.

The War Art wing was disquieting, knowing what it had come from; and she suspected that some of the "sculptures" were, in fact, ex-soldiers. But so much of the art was achingly beautiful, too, from officially-commissioned propaganda depicting the utopias they'd make of Cybertron after the war, to models of alien flora and lost hometowns sculpted from junk. Antebellum Cybertron had gorgeous religious artifacts and ceremonial capes, but Cybertron's fabric crafts paled in comparison to the robes, tapestries, and decorative armors of Eukaris, whose exhibit hall was full of pelts and plants. And on the matter of decorative armors—she felt plain next to the decorative plating, supported on car-shaped armatures, in the Velocitronian hall. The Ardurian hall was filled with sculptures, carvings, jewelry, and luxurious trinkets like buffers.

The theater was dedicated to the performance art of Caminus—dancing and singing. She ducked in, expecting to watch for a couple of minutes and move on. She was bewitched for almost an hour. When she left, she was still not sure yet if she would come to love the Cybertronian homeworld. But she already loved Caminus, its quicksilver museum, and its quicksilver dancers.

Stardrive didn't visit the last hall, the one with the collected works of the remaining colonies.

There was a place in there for her, and she wasn't ready to visit it yet.

###

Stardrive was debating retreating to the _Peaceful Revolution_ to be antisocial with Prowl when she heard a solemn voice: "Stardrive?"

Stardrive's spark momentarily stopped spinning. She turned toward the Mistress of Flame as though she were facing her own doom. "Hi."

Stardrive had seen Pyra Magna a few times via hologram comm call. She looked twice as imposing in person. The new gold filigree and flourishes she'd gained since the last time Stardrive had seen her were an odd juxtaposition, but the formal regalia of the new Mistress of Flame didn't make her the slightest bit less intimidating.

"I've been looking for you for the last half hour," Pyra Magna said. Ominously. "Have you been to the main hall to add your art yet?"

Stardrive said, "Oh." She added, "Right." She finally concluded, "No. Not yet."

"You did _bring_ your art?"

"Yes! I've got it." She patted a hand over her armor. "I just—haven't gone by."

"I see." Her expression was inscrutable, but subtly judgmental. "It's getting late. You should get them up before the party ends."

"Ahh. Right. I guess so," Stardrive said awkwardly. "I'll go there soon."

"Let's go."

"What?"

Pyra Magna was already heading down the hall. Stardrive hesitated, then helplessly trailed along.

###

Stardrive's reserved section was one of several free-standing walls in the main hall, with golden letters at the top that read "Elonia" in Elonian and "(Emissary)" in Neocybex underneath. A smooth, tall placard near one edge of the wall gave a three-sentence description of the colony and its sole representative; she glanced away when she saw her own name, embarrassed at the thought of hundreds of people passing through and _reading_ about her. The amount of space she had to fill, as wide as her outstretched arms, seemed impossibly vast. She definitely didn't have enough drawings for that.

"What have you got?"

Stardrive winced. "It's... not very good."

Pyra Magna gave her a sidelong look, and asked dryly, "Have you seen the dead bodies in the War Art wing?"

Okay. She couldn't argue with that. Reluctantly, she unfolded a plate of armor, and pulled out twenty-two pages.

They were two-hundred-year-old homework papers, from when she'd been training to join the Solstar Knights. She'd doodled on the margins and backs of her homework since she was a child. The Knights kept all their cadets' old paperwork carefully filed away; Stardrive had asked Rom a few weeks ago for hers. She'd combed through every piece of paper until she'd compiled the best of her idle doodles. It was all she had to offer.

And it wasn't very much. Drawings of herself as the Knight she hoped to be someday; planets of the Solstar Order, colored in as study aids; Knight spaceships and made-up bipedal modes for them, their bodies covered in thick lines, from when she'd fantasized about having another transforming friend.

Without making optic contact, she handed the papers over to Pyra Magna. "Sorry." She knew they didn't deserve the place of honor Pyra Magna was about to give them.

Pyra Magna flipped through Stardrive's drawings, one by one. She stopped on one page and held it out. "Who's this?"

Stardrive winced. "Me." She'd drawn herself vaguely frowning in annoyance. She'd probably been venting about studying for a test.

"I thought so." Pyra Magna looked at it again. "You grew up without any Cybertronian contact, right? Had you seen the Autobot symbol when you drew this?"

Stardrive frowned. "I don't think so, no. Why?"

"The kibble looks different," Pyra Magna traced the drawn spokes of Stardrive's helmet crest, "but the way you draw yourself looks like the First Face."

"The what?"

"The symbol that the Autobots adopted. It's supposed to represent the most average, prototypical Cybertronian you can imagine. And that's how you draw yourself. See—you've drawn in your chin and cheek guards, and outlined your nose the same way."

Stardrive glanced over the picture as Pyra Magna traced the features. "I guess," she conceded. "But why does it matter? I just drew myself the way I look."

"It's not the way an alien draws a Cybertronian." Pyra Magna started putting up Stardrive's drawings. They adhered effortlessly to the wall. Stardrive wanted to touch the wall to find out how, but worried her hand would stick. "Organics draw us like we have fleshy faces with helmets on. Cybertronians don't draw outlines." She put up one of Stardrive's spaceship pictures, crisscrossed with hard jagged lines. "We draw _seams._ "

Stardrive mentally traced the seams in her face as she visually traced them on her self-portrait. "Okay? What does that mean?" Because Pyra Magna had said that like it meant something.

Pyra Magna put the self-portrait at the center of the display, and tapped a finger twice on it and one of the spaceships. Hologram projections blew up both images five times larger. At least Stardrive didn't have to worry about not filling the space, but it was alarming to learn her homework would be visible from across the room. "It means that, even though you grew up thousands of light years removed from any other Cybertronian world, with absolutely no exposure to its cultures—without any teaching, training, or prompting, you still looked at yourself the same way that Cybertronians have looked at themselves for millions of years. That's something universal—something common in all our sparks."

Stardrive's optics heated up. She hadn't realized until that moment just how badly she'd needed to hear that she wasn't just a displaced Elonian soul rattling around in a Cybertronian suit of armor, but a real Cybertronian, down to her spark—that she was tied to her home world by something _other_ than war. Art. She was tied to them by art. Through her little doodles, she was tied to the ubiquitous Autobrand and the museum's mercury-curvy architecture and Camien dancers. Despite everything, she _was_ one with them. Barely above a whisper, she asked, " _Really_?"

"Maybe." Pyra Magna shrugged. "Honestly, I think the question of universal Cybertronians commonalities is better left to psychology than art theory. It sounds good though, doesn't it?" She smiled wryly. "It sounds like the kind of thing that people might want to believe in."

 _Stardrive_ certainly wanted to believe in it. Part of her already did believe it, even though Pyra Magna had only just suggested the idea and immediately brushed it off.

Pyra Magna went on, "It'll do for the didactic panel, anyway." She double-tapped on the placard with the three-sentence summary of Elonia; a hologram keyboard popped up in front of it, and Pyra Magna started typing. "Tell me what these are—I mean, the physical materials and the context in which you made them. And then I'll let you get back to the party."


	2. (5300-word full version)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't really proof this chapter because I'm like, I already edited this fic a dozen times to cut it down to 1,500 words, y'all can deal with one or two typos lmao enjoy.

"Are you sure this is the right planet?" Stardrive asked, leaning against one of the _Peaceful Revolution_ 's bridge windows to scan the rocky, sun-blasted landscape below.

"There's only one 'closest planet to the sun' in the Sol system," Prowl said calmly.

Stardrive gave him an exasperated look. "It's just—I don't see any signs of Camien life here—or _any_ life."

"Camiens haven't been on Mercury very long. They haven't hadn't a chance to leave many traces of their presence."

"But, what if the Camiens have a different definition of 'planet' and don't consider this the one closest to the sun? Or..." As the sun sank closer to the horizon behind them, something glinted on the horizon in front of them. Stardrive trailed off as she squinted at it. "Is that...?"

"The solar farm, I expect," Prowl said. "And the Camien settlement should be just beyond it, on the dark side of the planet."

"Ah." Stardrive heaved a long sigh. "Okay. Good. That's good."

"Less nervous now?"

Stardrive considered the question as they approached the solar farm—miles upon miles of black hexagons, brilliantly reflecting the sun. One in every fifty or so hexagons wasn't actually a solar panel but a glass mosaic, golds and reds and teals, depicting stately-looking titans and regal mechs and flames and inexplicably fancy hammers. She mentally compared them to the papers tucked under her armor, and winced. "Not really."

Prowl considered that, and nodded. "I'd be nervous too."

She wasn't sure if that made her feel better.

###

The Camien Fine Art Museum and Performance Hall of Mercury lived up to its name—the main building certainly looked like it could be a horseshoe-shaped museum, it embraced a dome-covered performance hall, and it shone like mercury. The museum was silvery, smooth, and rounded; the columns decorating the facade and the framework of the dome were clear crystal pipes with liquid quicksilver helixes flowing through them. Stardrive's optics were glued to the window. She'd never seen such a breathtakingly beautiful structure.

All Prowl had to mutter was, "Hook would have a fit if he saw this."

Stardrive gave him a baffled look. He said, "Hook hates rounded corners," like that explained anything.

Below, dozens of ships were parked in front of the museum. Around the museum and visible through the performance hall dome were hundreds of Cybertronians—more than Stardrive had ever seen together at once outside of battle. She was always surprised when she saw crowds of Cybertronians—saw all the colors and shapes they'd come in. When she'd pictured Cybertronians as a child, she'd always imagined that they would be the dull gray and steel colors of industrial kitchen supplies, and would look exactly like her except crueler. But no. Cybertronians came in rainbows.

"So," Prowl said, as the ship coasted to a stop several hundred feet over the museum. "This is your stop."

"You're not coming along?" she asked, as a way of asking, _Please come along, I know you._

The implied question sailed over Prowl's head. He laughed shortly. "I'm not that big on art when it's _not_ accompanied by a massive party and gala. We'll stay here overnight and I'll check out the show tomorrow when the crowds are gone."

"Ah," Stardrive said, disappointed.

"Do you want to fly down, or wait until we've landed and drive in?"

If she procrastinated, she might lose her nerve. "I'll fly." She'd seen several other fliers darting around, she wouldn't stand out.

"I'll comm our coordinates once I've parked." Just before Stardrive left the bridge, Prowl added stiffly, "Have fun."

###

She wandered the museum as an excuse to avoid going to the gala in the performance hall, seeing what displays were already up.

The War Art wing was disquieting. Too much of it seemed to be art made from the dead, most (but not all) by Decepticons, with names like Buzzsaw and Bonecrusher. The names of the artists and of the materials were listed. Just looking at them made Stardrive shudder.

But so much of the art was achingly beautiful, too. Commissioned paintings and frescos made by artists on both sides, with hundreds of tiny happy faces, showing the utopias they hoped they'd make of Cybertron once their side won. Photographs soldiers took of each other, dirty, tired, and smiling brightly, arms wrapped a little too tightly around each other's shoulders. Recreations of alien flora, fauna, and people, made out of spare parts by the soldiers stationed on their worlds. Stardrive stood for a long time fascinated by a tree made out of hundreds of wires twisted together and thousands of tiny gears for leaves. Fascinated by a scale model of a Cybertronian city called Vos, reconstructed from memory by a dozen different artists, with little jets that magnetically hovered in place between the buildings. Fascinated by a shrine in an empty energon cube to gods she'd never learned the names of—"Primus," she'd heard in the past few months, but not the others. Fascinated by poems found burned into barrack walls with lasers, poems about perpetual hunger and fearful love for a frontliner and boredom between battles and what colors the stars were that night.

Stardrive remembered being told, two centuries ago, by a scornful teacher in a room of bright-eyed children, that Cybertronians had no culture, no creativity, no passion—only war. War and nothing else. Here was proof that everyone who'd ever told her about Cybertronians was wrong: even when they _were_ at war, even when their society was nothing _but_ war, they made art—art from the war, art about the war, art dreaming of the end of the war, art that let them escape the war. As much art as Elonians.

Stardrive didn't _just_ come from war. She came from this, too.

She felt a weight lifting off her spark.

###

There were three small theaters on the second floor of the museum.

The first theater was showing three movies (fiction), the first pieces of joint Cybertronian/Earthling cinema; one was identified as an Academy Award winner, which she assumed meant it must be some student film at an art school. Cross-planet collaboration had to start small, she supposed. Stardrive couldn't get into that theater, there was a crowd around the door, but she paused to peer through the crowd at a blue jet who was holding a human and a small fuzzy animal, in space suits, in his hands. The animal was cute. But the jet appeared to be the center of attention, so she moved on.

The second theater was showing the documentaries of a mech named Rewind. From his picture she recognized him as one of the mechs animatedly talking with the blue jet. She ducked in to watch a few minutes of mechs having an animated discussion in a bar, laughed a few times, and ducked back out.

The third theater was dedicated to the performance art of Caminus—dancing and singing. What would Cybertronian singing sound like? To her, Neocybex sounded too... garbage-disposal-y to be suited to song. Not like Elonian. Caminus was a colony, though—maybe they found an alien language to sing in? She ducked in, expecting to watch for a couple of minutes and move on.

She was bewitched for almost an hour.

When she left, she was still not sure yet if she would come to love Cybertron—the homeworld, Cybertron. But she already loved Caminus, its quicksilver museum, and its quicksilver dancers.

###

According to a map she found near the main staircase, there were exhibit halls for Antebellum Cybertron, for Velocitron, for Devisiun, for Arduria, and for Eukaris. The remaining colonies all shared a single massive hall—those ones, she supposed, had contributed too little to stand on its own.

Too many of the artifacts, in every hall, were displays as photos or holograms. It dawned on Stardrive, slowly, that this was why they'd all been brought together, as much art as they could get from all of Cybertron's colonies: to see how much art their civilization had left that hadn't been devoured by Unicron. She'd thought the museum so large, so grand, when she'd first saw it. Now, though, thinking about how small it really was, when all of Cybertron's artistic history could be squeezed inside it, when half of Cybertron's colonies—including her own—could be fit in one room, she felt a strange sense of melancholy: the loss of a home she'd never known.

Antebellum Cybertron had some gorgeous religious artifacts and ceremonial capes—and Stardrive finally found out what the hammer motifs she'd seen on the solar panels meant—but Cybertron's fabric crafts paled in comparison to the robes, tapestries, and decorative armors of Eukaris, whose exhibit hall was full of pelts and plants. And on the matter of decorative armors—she felt absolutely plain next to the decorative plating, supported on car-shaped armatures, in the Velocitronian hall. Each one displayed the name of the artist and the racer who'd worn these decorations, in what felt like the spiritual opposite of the corpse art in the War Art wing. She made note of several of the artists to look up later; maybe she too would look cool with white constellations and deep blue nebulas painted along her arms and legs. The Ardurian hall was filled with sculptures, carvings, beautiful calligraphic signs in a language that almost looked like Neocybex but that she couldn't read; and jewelry, trinkets, luxurious little items like pots and cups and buffers. Signs explained that although Arduria had fallen hundreds of thousands of years ago, they'd remained Cybertron's on-again-off-again allies for millions of years and thus Cybertronian emigrants had many Ardurian imports it could display.

Stardrive didn't visit the last hall, the one with the collected works of the remaining colonies.

There was a place in there for her, and she wasn't ready to visit it yet.

###

Walking down the hall in search of a refreshment table she'd been promised, she stumbled to a stop, her vents froze, and her optics widened and brightened. Coming the other direction, talking animatedly with three other mechs, was a goddess, with paint the colors of rubies and new copper, and actual flames blazing out of her head. Stardrive exclaimed, " _Oh!_ "

The goddess stopped and turned to face her, smiling brilliantly. "Hey! You look like you know me, have we met?"

In the light of that smile, Stardrive felt half her brain bluescreen. "You're... I saw you dancing, in the—"

"Oh, you watched the videos!" Her brilliant smile brightened. "I'm _so_ glad! Most of Caminus's art is performance art, but we were worried nobody would want to sit in the dark and watch us. What did you think? Did you like me?" The goddess pirouetted, her flame twirling in a helix that reminded Stardrive of the mercury columns outside.

"Yes," she whispered.

"You're too kind!" The goddess held out a hand. "I'm Firestar. Of Caminus, obviously."

"Oh—same!" Stardrive blurted out. "I mean—" She took Firestar's hand, "I mean—Star! My name has a Star, too. I'm Stardrive." Firestar's hand was so hot.

"Of?"

"Elonia!"

"Oh, _you're_ the Elonian! Pyra and Windblade are going to be so thrilled you made it! I heard them talking about you."

Oh, wow, the religious and political leaders of Cybertron were talking about her. They were going to be so disappointed. She half hoped the papers tucked under her armor would burst into flame from being this close to Firestar.

Then Firestar leaned in and said, in a way that felt conspiratorial even though it wasn't any quieter, "I hope I'll see you at the gala on the dance floor, too. It takes a couple of Stars to make a constellation." She winked. Stardrive laughed, even though she wasn't entirely sure that was a joke.

As Firestar's entourage passed by, a purple mech trailing behind her leaned over and bumped her shoulder. "You look a little starstruck." She grinned apologetically. "Don't worry. She had that effect in everyone."

They passed on, leaving Stardrive behind.

###

She could only delay so long before she had to go either to the gala or to her exhibit hall. She'd found the refreshments, she'd had some kind of gummy energon treats (she didn't know you _could_ make energon gummies), and she was now left with the choice of either loitering next to the snacks all night or heading to one or the other.

So she headed to the gala.

Stardrive heard the music long before she reached the performance hall. The doors were locked open, and the chairs were gone—folded into the floor, maybe, she'd seen that before on Cybertronian ships, even their furniture could transform—and the performance hall was full of dancing mechs. Mostly Cybertronians, a handful of aliens—humans particularly, on hovering platforms that put them eye-to-optic with the mechs.

A small green mech, sitting at a table at the door, noisily reset his vocalizer to get her attention. "Excuse me," he said severely. "Are you on the VIP list?"

"I—" She looked to him, to the dance, and back to him. "I don't know. Do I have to be to get in?"

"No. But if you _are,_ you're supposed to wear a badge." He tapped a finger on a stack of gold badges. They were gold, shaped like flames, and had the words like ARTIST, DIRECTOR, PERFORMER, and PATRON slapped across them.

"How do I know if I'm one?"

"There's a list." The little green mech held up a datapad. "Name?"

"Stardrive," she said, and when the green mech continued to stare at her, she quickly added, "Of Elonia! Sorry. I'm not used to having a full name." She laughed awkwardly.

His gaze softened. "Ah. You're one of the orphans?"

Her awkward smile faded. "Come again?"

"The only Cybertronian survivor of your colony. There's two of you." He held out a badge that said ARTIST. "You might meet the other one. She checked in earlier."

Stardrive nodded politely as she took the badge, as though grateful for this information, but to be honest she didn't know what to do with it. She might have been the only living member of her _species_ from Elonia, but her _people_ had been rescued.

She carefully placed her badge on her armor, and entered the gala.

She'd never been to a dance before—or a party of any kind. She'd never been invited to any, as a Transformer among organics. When the Solstar Knights were asked to provide security at big interplanetary events, she was told to stay in the ship as backup. Even as a child, she'd been politely but firmly discouraged from coming to school dances with the other students, for fear of their safety if a giant war machine started cutting up the dance floor. And yet, despite her total inexperience, driven by some instinct that transcended time, space, culture, and species, she did exactly what every shy soul does upon entering a party.

She hugged the nearest wall and started looking around for people she knew.

Stardrive was disappointed not to see a flaming crown anywhere in the crowd, although she wasn't sure she'd have had the courage to go over even if Firestar _had_ been here. She didn't see any of the Knights; probably none of them had wanted to learn more about Cybertronian culture. Almost all of the Cybertronians she knew were on the _Peaceful Revolution_ , parked outside. Maybe if she edged along the wall long enough, she'd find another snack table—

Was that another Dire Wraith in the crowd?

It was. Did she know him? She couldn't tell from this distance. He looked like a sorcerer, but he wouldn't be exposed at an event like this if he was still pro-galactic-conquest, right? She stretched out her arm to wave in his direction, and, when he didn't glance over, _stretched out_ her arm, all sharp claws and sinewy cables, to wave again.

This time, he saw her, and raised a hand to wave back. She weaved her way through the crowd toward him. She wondered if Autobots and Decepticons would hang out with each other if they met on alien worlds.

She hissed a greeting—she couldn't get the accent quite right without wraithing up her face, but she'd gotten reasonably fluent during her two centuries weaving uncertainly between the Solstar Order and Wraith territory—and said, "I didn't think any other Dire Wraiths would be here."

"Neither did I." He pointed at the mech next to him, one of half a dozen Decepticons standing in a little huddle. "I'm his plus one." The mech that the sorcerer had referred to had a rather alarming head injury. Stardrive opened her mouth to ask if he was okay, noted the absolute lack of panic in the little circle she'd just joined, reconsidered, and shut it. "I'm something of an outcast, I'm afraid." He said it carefully, searching her face, as though hoping she'd react positively but not quite wholly confident.

She smiled broadly in relief. "Me too! I'm a— Did you ever hear about a Cybertronian in the Solstar Knights?" It was her turn to pause and wait for his reaction, hoping he wouldn't immediately label her as an enemy.

His teeth gleamed as he smiled. "Yes! I'd heard rumors that we had partially converted a mechanical Knight. It _must_ have been lonely, stranded in the middle between two warring sides as you were."

Had it really been that lonely? She'd hardly ever stopped to think about it. Had it been more lonely than when she'd lived on Elonia, a walking war machine among people who feared her? No, it hadn't been any more lonely; but it hadn't been any less, either. "Very."

He nodded sympathetically. "When I was at my loneliest, I found solace in religion. I don't know if you have any...?"

She shook her head. "I've never worshipped the Presence." Although she'd certainly gotten an earful about Her from other Dire Wraiths.

"Neither do I. I found my faith on a world called Temptoria," the sorcerer said. "Have you heard of the Brand?" At her blank look, he pressed on: "You may find some solace in it. A child of three species as you are, why, you may have been begotten by a Crossover—"

" _Okay_ , Thunderwraith." A bright magenta arm inserted itself between their faces. "Much as I love that every outing with you turns into a proselytization mission, I think maybe we should, you know, actually exchange names first. Hi." The magenta jet scooted in between Stardrive and the sorcerer and grinned winningly. "Introductions. We're the Aerial Warfare Subjugation Task Force. Going around the circle from your other side, that's Doomwings, Space Scar, Variable Star, War Blade, Wind War—they're Windblade's little-known triplets, the deadly Wind War Blade Trio—our beloved and charming mascot Janice," he patted the Dire Wraith's shoulder, "and me, their dashing leader Fallen Angel." He held out a hand to shake. "Who are you?"

###

After learning the Scavengers' _real_ names, Stardrive found out that one of them was the other "orphan" that the mech at the door had mentioned: Nickel of Prion. Unicron hadn't even gotten her world; it had been destroyed before her optics by robophobic invaders. Stardrive had offered what awkward sympathies she could. Compared to that, Stardrive felt like the label "orphan" was an egregious exaggeration of what Stardrive was.

"I brought pictures," Nickel said, glancing down at her ARTIST badge. "I'm not an artist and I didn't bring anyone else's with me when I left—but I had some photos. And photography is art, right?" She glanced at Stardrive. "What did you bring?"

"Less than that," she admitted. "Just some drawings I did a long time ago. Doodles, actually. I didn't even think of bringing photos." She wished she had.

"That's better than me," Nickel said with a wry smile. "I didn't even _make_ anything."

"You wouldn't say that if you could see them," Stardrive said glumly.

###

She'd been chatting with the Scavengers for maybe fifteen minutes—or listening, anyway, while Misfire and a short red-and-white Autobot he'd spotted in the crowd ran ninety percent of the conversation—when a clear voice said, "Stardrive?"

The group fell silent. Stardrive's spark momentarily stopped spinning. She turned toward the Mistress of Flame as though she were facing her own doom. "Hi."

Stardrive had seen Pyra Magna a few times via hologram comm call, whenever she updated Prowl about events on Earth and Prowl updated her on the _Peaceful Revolution_. She hadn't thought Pyra Magna had seen _her_ through those calls, and yet she'd recognized Stardrive. Maybe Prowl had sent Pyra Magna a picture of her? That seemed like the kind of thing Prowl would do. Multiple pictures, complete with a two hundred page biography and a psychological profile he'd made up by running her through psych tests without her noticing.

Pyra Magna looked twice as imposing in person as she did over comms. If Stardrive had been told that she'd killed a mech with her shoulder, she would have believed it. The new gold filigree and flourishes she'd gained since the last time Stardrive had seen her over comm was an odd juxtaposition, but the formal regalia of the new Mistress of Flame did not in the very slightest bit whatsoever make her look less intimidating.

"I've been looking for you," Pyra Magna said, in a way that reminded Stardrive more of a dashing hero calmly confronting her villainous nemesis than like a normal person looking for another normal person.

"Oh?" Stardrive said, like she didn't know why.

"Have you been to the main hall to add your art yet?"

Stardrive said, "Oh." She added, "Right." She finally concluded, "No. Not yet."

"You did _bring_ your art?" Stardrive thought she detected an implied, _you better have_.

"Yes! I've got it." She patted a hand over her armor. "I just—haven't gone by the main hall yet."

"I see." She was just as inscrutable as Prowl was when she said that. And she looked like him too—same head shape and everything. Stardrive wondered if Cybertronians had siblings. Was Misfire telling the truth when he'd said triplets were a thing? "It's getting late. You should get them up before the party ends."

"Ahh. Right. I guess so," Stardrive said awkwardly. "I'll go there soon."

"Let's go."

"What?"

Pyra Magna had already turned away and was heading toward the door. Stardrive looked helplessly back at the Scavengers—they all pointedly avoided making optic contact with her—and she reluctantly trailed after Pyra Magna.

###

Nickel's photos had been blown up into hologram projections that were almost as tall as Nickel herself was. Stardrive lingered to look at them—pictures of Nickel with other bots the same size as her, grinning at the camera, with a desert or a beach or a metal city in the background. Thirteen pictures had been blown up and highlighted; dozens more, left at their original sizes were on the wall behind the holograms. Some of the smaller pictures were awful-looking candids, pictures of weird underwater rock formations or the kinds of boring pictures of the clouds taken by everyone who went flying for the first time. Stardrive was relieved that so many of Nickel's pictures were just bland. Maybe hers wouldn't stand out.

"Stardrive?"

"Sorry! Coming." Stardrive hurried over to Pyra Magna. "I was just—sorry. I met Nickel. I wanted to see what she brought."

"You can look once we get your art up." She didn't _quite_ sound impatient, but it was close enough that Stardrive still felt cowed.

Stardrive's reserved display was, like Nickel's, a free-standing wall in the middle of the main hall, with golden letters at the top that read "Elonia" in Elonian and Neocybex, and "(Emissary)" in Neocybex underneath. A smooth, tall panel near one edge of the wall gave a three-sentence description of the colony and its sole representative; she glanced away when she read her own name, embarrassed at the thought of hundreds of people passing through here and _reading_ about her. The amount of space she had to fill, as wide as her outstretched arms, seemed like an impossibly vast expanse. She definitely didn't have enough drawings for that. Which meant some would probably get blown up like Nickel's, which meant more people would see them, and—

"What have you got?"

Stardrive winced. "It's... not very good."

Pyra Magna gave her a sidelong look, and asked dryly. "Have you seen the dead bodies in the War Art wing?"

Okay. She couldn't argue with that. Reluctantly, she unfolded a plate of armor, and pulled out twenty-two pieces of paper.

They were old pieces of homework, over two hundred years old, from when she'd been training to join the Solstar Knights. The Knights had kept hold of them, all their cadets' old paperwork carefully filed away, until Stardrive had asked Rom a few weeks ago for the old copies of her homework. She used to doodle in the margins and on the backs of her homework—always had, since she was a child, but any traces of her childhood scrawlings had been lost with Elonia. She'd combed through every piece of paper until she'd compiled the best of her idle doodles. It was all she had to offer.

And it wasn't very much. Drawings of herself as the Knight she hoped to be someday; drawings of the planets of the Solstar Order, colored in and assigned symbols as study aids; drawings of space ships she'd seen and made-up bipedal modes for them when she'd fantasized about having another transforming friend, their bodies covered in thick ugly black lines.

Without making optic contact, she handed the papers over to Pyra Magna. "Sorry." She knew they didn't deserve the place of honor Pyra Magna was about to give them.

Pyra Magna flipped through Stardrive's drawings, one by one. She stopped on one page and held it out to Stardrive. "Who's this?"

Stardrive glanced at it, and winced. "Me." She'd drawn her own face, vaguely frowning in annoyance. She'd probably been venting about studying for a test.

"I thought so." Pyra Magna looked at it again. "You grew up without any contact with Cybertron, right? Had you ever seen the Autobot symbol when you drew this?"

Stardrive frowned. "I don't think so, no," she said. "I don't know where I would have seen it. Why?"

"Because the kibble looks different, of course," Pyra Magna traced the drawn spokes of Stardrive's helmet crest, "but the way you draw yourself looks like the First Face."

"The what?"

"The symbol that the Autobots adopted. It's supposed to represent—a generic Cybertronian. The most average, prototypical Cybertronian you can imagine. And that's how you draw yourself. See—you've drawn in your chin and cheek guards, and outlined your nose the same way."

Stardrive glanced over the picture as Pyra Magna traced the features. "I guess," she conceded grudgingly. "But why does it matter? I just drew myself the way I look."

"It's not the way an alien draws a Cybertronian." Pyra Magna started putting up Stardrive's drawings. They adhered effortlessly to the wall. Stardrive wanted to touch the wall to find out how, but was afraid her hand would get stuck. "Organics tend to draw us like we have organic faces with helmets on. Cybertronians don't draw outlines." She put up one of Stardrive's spaceship pictures, crisscrossed with hard jagged lines. "We draw _seams._ "

Stardrive looked again at her frustrated self-portrait, and mentally traced the seams in her face as she visually traced them on the drawing. "Okay? What does that mean?" Because Pyra Magna had said that like it meant something, but Stardrive couldn't see what.

Pyra Magna put the self-portrait in a point of pride at the center of the display, and tapped a finger twice on it and on one of the spaceships. Hologram projections blew up both images five times larger. "It means that, even though you grew up thousands of light years removed from any other Cybertronian, with absolutely no exposure to the culture of Cybertron or any of its colonies—without any teaching, training, or prompting, you still looked at yourself the same way that Cybertronians have looked at themselves for millions of years. That's something universal—something that must be common in all our sparks."

Stardrive felt her spark well up at Pyra Magna's words, and her optics heated up. She hadn't realized until that moment just how badly she'd wanted—no, _needed_ to hear that she wasn't just a displaced Elonian soul rattling around in a Cybertronian suit of armor, but a real Cybertronian, down to her spark—that she was tied to her home world by something _other_ than war. Art. She was tied to them by art. Through her little doodles, she was tied to the Autobrand on Prowl's chest and the mosaic titans on the solar panels and the way Firestar danced. Despite everything, she _was_ one with them. Barely above a whisper, she asked, " _Really_?"

"Maybe." Pyra Magna shrugged. "I think the question of what Cybertronians have in common when you strip away the culture is a better question left to psychology than art theory, really. It sounds good though, doesn't it?" She smiled wryly. "It sounds like the kind of thing that people might like to believe in."

The Mistress of Flame was probably better qualified to comment on what people might like to believe in than Stardrive was. _Stardrive_ certainly wanted to believe in it, though. Part of her already did believe it, even though Pyra Magna had only just suggested the idea and immediately brushed it off.

Pyra Magna went on, "It'll do for the didactic panel, anyway." She double-tapped on the panel with the three-sentence summary of Elonia; a hologram keyboard popped up in front of it, and Pyra Magna started adding new information about the art. "Tell me what these are—I mean, the physical materials and the context in which you made them. And then I'll let you get back to the gala."

###

Stardrive was strangely ebullient when she returned to the gala—lifted up by the idea that there was something other than violence, something beautiful, that tied Cybertronians together, and the idea that she shared it in common with them.

The small green mech at the door insisted she pause before entering so he could straighten out her "ARTIST" badge, and she took the opportunity to scan the crowd, trying to figure out where the Scavengers had gone. She wanted to talk to Nickel again, and to her fellow Dire Wraith, even if he probably only wanted to talk to her to raise her Brand awareness—

Her vents hitched.

She saw a flaming torch bobbing through the crowd.

###

"Hey!" Firestar's smile stretched wider. "My Star sister! You found me!"

"I saw your flame," Stardrive said.

Firestar laughed. "Of course you did," she said. "Are you here to dance with me?" She pirouetted once and held out her hand, inviting Stardrive to take it.

Stardrive reached out for it, then hesitated. "I... don't actually know how to dance."

"Great!" Firestar grabbed her hand and tugged her in. "I _love_ teaching people!"

Stardrive spent the rest of the evening twirling through the gala, dancing with Firestar's friends and, when she could catch hold of them, the Scavengers. The lights of the gala glinted off the crystal and quicksilver pipes laced through the dome of the Camien Fine Art Museum and Performance Hall of Mercury. It was such a beautiful place. She thought, maybe, someday, she might like to have more art inside.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed the fic, I'd love to hear from you, either here or on tumblr! The post for the fic on tumblr is [here](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/190090751237/self-portraits-from-elonia-ckret2)!


End file.
